http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17955
--- Comment #50 from Marc-Olivier Barre marco@marcochapeau.org 2009-09-06 17:32:13 --- (In reply to comment #49)
Actually resources of Wine developers and community are limited. What you described - is right way to do, but it's utopia unless YOU get it in your own hands and find exact repro steps and reason why we experienced these crashes. In real world when working on big projects (my current job is QA Team Lead in the biggest casual games company - Oberon Media) like Wine developers can't spend their time finding source of each and every bug, especially when reporter has no clue by which module it is caused.
Your position as a QA team lead in a company that builds proprietary closed source software is probably not relevant, really... I'm pretty sure Microsoft themselves have a lot of QA guys too. Do they help ? Obviously... no. That being said...
Wine resources are limited, sure, I agree. I work on free softwares myself, and time is hard to find when this is not your day job.
As for the exact reproduction steps : - Compile something big, make it last long, burn CPU and memory (compiling wine is a good start :) ) - Once you've done that, close all windows and programs, grab a beer and relax. - Click on your EVE icon. Crash should occur in the next 5 minutes.
This at least should make the crash reproducible and help test if it is magically gone or not... As of 1.1.29, it's not.
Now as far as helping to debug wine is concerned, before this even happens, we would need tools to do that. As stated *many times* in this bug report, running wine properly and getting a proper back-trace is near impossible. Unless someone has the knowledge to make a suggestion that wasn't tested yet.
I would be willing to help with wine development, but I just do not have the time and resources to improve the debugger... sorry.